Apples and Oranges
by Frozzy
Summary: Sasuke treats Sakura as he is able. Itachi, with a few chosen words, makes Sakura reconsider that while this is well and good for Sasuke, it might be less well and good for Sakura herself. (AU!Non-Massacre, zero bashing, happy-family-kinda-thing)


**A/N:** I went way off canon here. Possibly the most that I've ever been off canon, and yet I wanted to try this when it popped into my head. I'm still working on my other stuff, but in the meantime, please enjoy this little gem in lieu of my multi-chaptered fics. Those take a lot of my energy to produce, and I have precious little energy left in the face of writing my original novel series. Also, if you've read _The Taste of Peaches_ , consider this the happier counterpart to that piece. Sort of. Not really. But well, I made a lot of people sad with that one, so hopefully I can make a lot of people happy with this one. By the way, the fact that the two titles both include fruits is entirely coincidental aside from the fact that I seem to have a fetish for fruits as metaphors.

* * *

 **Apples and Oranges  
** By Frozzy

In the one year that she had dated Sasuke, give or take some months, waking up to an empty bed was not a strange feeling for Sakura, and so upon awakening amidst the vast sea of finely threaded cotton that was Sasuke's sheets at the grandiose Uchiha home on a sunny morning, Sakura rubbed her eyes and sat up on her elbows to take a stock of things.

At first, nothing seemed unusual.

It was morning, she was in Sasuke's bed, and she was alone.

It was only when she noticed the thick splash of sunlight cutting the room in half that she realized how Sasuke had not just left without waking her up; he had left, knowing full well that her agenda was filled to the brim with appointments, and that on this particular day, she had a very important appointment that could not, under any circumstances, be missed. As it was a matter that concerned public funding for the hospital, it was a case that was extremely dear to her heart, not to mention one that she had mentioned to Sasuke time and time again.

And now she was late and wouldn't make it in time.

"Jerk," Sakura said and fell back on her pillow, hair spilling out like a fluffed-up halo.

After years of overexposure, the wisdom of Kakashi's work ethic had successfully been passed on to his female student, though not without many trials and errors. Long ago, a missed appointment such as this would have had her flurrying out of the house in a frenzy. Nowadays, that was no longer the case. Nowadays, she took most missed appointments with a grain of salt. It was her luck that this was a rather accepted thing in shinobi society. Kakashi took gross advantage of this, of course, but that was a different matter altogether. Shinobi led a highly unpredictable life in which summons could arrive from anywhere and at any point in time, telling you to drop whatever you held in your hands and report for immediate duty. It made no difference whether the thing in your arms was your newborn baby or a sack of rotten potatoes.

Regardless, Sasuke was still a jerk.

"And that quite so," she said for effect and swung out of bed.

She ran a hand through her hair in an attempt to make herself look presentable without her regular remedies at hand. Yawning into the morning air, a movement that sent dust motes sailing about in the sunlight before her gaping mouth, she slipped into her shorts and top after which she pocketed her gloves in the pouch that sat snapped tight to her hip. Now that the rest of her schedule for today was inevitably delayed, she could just as well enjoy her morning at a more relaxed pace than what she had initially planned. Taking a somewhat misguided perverse joy in that decision of hers, she left Sasuke's bedroom with her course set for the kitchen and a hearty breakfast.

Sakura was intimately familiar with the infrastructure of the Uchiha home.

This fact had held true even before she had begun to date Sasuke. The Uchiha family didn't appreciate strangers in their home any more than any other family of their station did, partly for fear of the secrets that they held close to their clan, but Sakura and Naruto had long ago been granted permission to come and go as they pleased, provided that they didn't show up at odd hours in the night or during dinnertime without an explicit invitation. Or with a gaping wound in their side like Naruto had once done. Granted, Naruto could show up wherever and whenever he wanted these days, prerogative of the Hokage, and people couldn't complain about it. Not to his face, that was.

Ah, she thought. There it was. The kitchen.

With her feet guiding the way and her mind otherwise engaged, Sakura realized too late that the kitchen was already occupied. "Oh," she said after she had stomped inside as if she owned the thing. "I'm sorry. I didn't think anyone was here."

Itachi sat by the kitchen table, peeling an orange and arranging the slices on a neatly folded napkin in a… was that… a geometrical pattern?

"That's all right," he said and put down the orange.

Sakura was a friend of the Uchiha clan, plus Sasuke's girlfriend, so it would have been impossible to avoid Itachi altogether, and yet she had never had much interaction with Sasuke's elder brother besides the customary hello and goodbye. She knew the gossip and the rumors, but she paid those no attention. She did know for certain that Itachi was on good terms with Naruto, but Naruto, forever the center of admiration and goodwill, was on good terms with everything that had a beating pulse.

The only personal contact that Sakura had ever had with the elder Uchiha, meaning the only contact that she thought to be true to his character, was the times that he had been her patient.

It was a statistic fact that ANBU routinely had it worst in the field, particularly the captains, but in the case of Uchiha Itachi there had been a handful of times where even Sakura had doubted the prodigy's chances of survival. And, mind you, she was the longtime teammate of Uchiha Sasuke and Uzumaki Naruto; she had intimate experience with beating the odds. Perhaps Itachi was targeted for his reputation, or perhaps he threw himself into the line of fire with little to no consideration for his own survival. Sakura found both options equally sound, but whichever was the truest to form, he always pulled through in some of the worst elbow-deep-and-still-standing cases that Sakura had ever executed and supervised.

And yet, despite all of this, Itachi had never been anything more to Sakura than an acquaintance.

This was something that she lamented – in a way.

Itachi was an important figure in Konoha. He stood on level with Sakura herself, although they operated in very different fields. It was only natural that Sakura sought to understand him better, both as a precautionary measure and out of simple respect. Sakura liked to be ahead in the game. She liked to know who might foster either progress or threat upon her village and home. All the members of the Uchiha clan were on that list, surely, just like all the members of the Hyuuga clan. This was purely due to their influence and power in the overall community. It was a sad fact, Sakura thought, considering that they were all so damnable hard to get a proper grasp on.

"Please sit," Itachi said and Sakura realized that she stood immobilized in the middle of the room.

"Did you just return?" she asked the elder Uchiha.

"Yes," Itachi answered and wiped his hands with another napkin than the one which lay stuck beneath his geometrical pattern of orange slices. "You can find breakfast on the top shelf."

She found a plate of eggs tucked away behind a head of cabbage. Cold as it might be, it was easier than bringing out pots and pans to make something from scratch. She had done that before, even made breakfast for a couple of Sasuke's younger cousins once, but she would certainly not to do so now, not with Itachi watching her like this. She was comfortable in the Uchiha home, yes, but not with one of the most reclusive clan members breathing down her neck. She had been alone with Itachi before, but this particular scenario was a rare one in the sense that she had never sat down and shared an actual meal with the man before. In fact, she had a hard time imagining Itachi eat at all, and yet here he was, eating an orange in a manner that was so clinical and so neat that it made even Sakura's jaw itch and ache.

"Any injuries?" she asked, reverting to habit.

"None to speak of," he answered, which could mean anything from a yes to a no. "Sasuke left an hour ago. He was summoned."

"Yes, I had rather thought so." She grabbed her plate of eggs and sat down opposite of Itachi at the table. He wasn't particularly unwelcoming or unapproachable, she thought, but she hadn't been prepared for this scenario when she had first set out towards the kitchen. She needed some time to adjust. "I had an important meeting. I didn't mean to still be here, much less have breakfast here, but Sasuke didn't wake me up, I'm afraid."

"I am aware."

Something in Itachi's voice made Sakura look up from her breakfast, mindless of the dark circles underneath her eyes and the unappealing state of her splotchy face. Nobody looked pretty in the morning. Nobody except for Ino, that was, with her princess face that was fit for tooth commercials and acne cream at every hour of the day. Speaking of that, Sakura could feel the beginnings of a pimple near her chin. Her period was next week, so she shouldn't be surprised. Hormonal imbalance made her skin act like a sponge for impurities, but now was probably not the time to contemplate this unfortunate fact, was it?

"Pardon?" she asked.

"You leave the premises at dawn. It seems customary, shall we say."

"Premises? What— customary?"

"Customary."

From Itachi's replies, Sakura sensed the faint stirrings of a delicate implication that she heretofore hadn't believed him capable of. She was equally surprised to find that she could actually hear the implication. This was either a side effect from years of decoding Sasuke-speech, or it was because Itachi wanted her to hear it. "Sasuke leaves at dawn," she said, taking a chance. "I don't."

"Indeed," Itachi said with a hint of a smile. "It's a habit of his. One he adopted years ago, I think. He must find much comfort in it since he hasn't adjusted it to your benefit."

Sakura felt the first flare of true indignation on Sasuke's behalf.

"Sasuke doesn't _make_ me leave," she said. It was true that she often woke up to an empty bed, but Sasuke didn't purposely leave in some sort of passive-aggressive act to make her do the same.

"My brother's manners are not among the best of his age. I am sure you already know this, having been his teammate for over a decade."

"Why are you talking to me? About this, I mean?" She put her fork down with a small clatter. Itachi didn't seem faced by either her words or her action, unintentionally dramatic as it had been.

"You are in my home, sitting with me at the breakfast table. Would you prefer stilted silence?"

For the first time since entering the kitchen, Sakura let herself look properly at the man before her. He was dressed in casual clothes, wearing a thin cotton shirt with a low neckline and a large tear in one sleeve that looked as if someone had tried to slice his arm off. Which was probably just about right, come to think of it. His hair was tied back in its regular polished fashion, but it looked sloppier than usual. Despite him having just returned from a mission, one that Sakura was privy to only because of her role in the management of the hospital and the ANBU units in particular, he didn't look as if he had recently been rolling in blood and guts up to his neck.

"Well," she said, opting for diplomacy. "I would prefer stilted silence over subtle insults."

"It was no insult on your part."

"You insulted Sasuke."

"You take offense on my brother's behalf after I say that I disapprove of the way he treats you?"

His eyes were a shade darker than Sasuke's, Sakura concluded, with less vibrancy and more depth to the shade. She had her own hypothesis that this was due to his supremely advanced Sharingan of which Sasuke yet had to reach an equal level. All of the Uchiha members had black eyes, but none of the shades were identical. It was something that intrigued Sakura very much. She had asked Sasuke about it once, but he had looked at her and shrugged. Medical questions weren't his forte, nor were they his interest.

"Sasuke treats me fine."

"He treats you as he is able."

"He treats me fine."

In some part of her brain, further back than anything else, Sakura found it incredibly ironic that Itachi was the one to come to her defense. She was well aware that she accepted a treatment from Sasuke that she would accept from no one else, but she didn't need his older brother to confront her about this. She already struggled enough with it herself. Also, she still firmly believed that Sasuke didn't purposely abandon her each and every morning after they had spent the night together. Of that she was convinced, if of nothing else. He was an early riser and hated to sit idle, she knew.

It hadn't been like this at first, though, had it?

Sasuke had been the one to take the initiative to ask her out on their first date, and Sakura… well, she had just sort of rolled with it. Sasuke had been the easy choice; she would admit that. It also didn't hurt that he had been her crush as a teenager. There was that, too, of course.

"I have ample respect for your skills next to a surgery table and in the field," Itachi said and startled Sakura out of her sudden reverie. "Which is why it irks me to see you bend your head for my idiot of a brother."

"Sasuke is not an idiot."

With a private smile that Sakura suspected was very much at her expense, Itachi fixed his eyes on a point slightly above her shoulder, almost as if he wanted to spare her his direct gaze when he spoke next. "Of what I just said, that is the part you choose to address?"

Sakura stood up from her chair. "I must go now. Thank you for letting me sit with you."

"My pleasure. If you see my brother, tell him that he left my training equipment in a less than ideal state yesterday night. I should wish for it to be returned to me in proper condition next time that he borrows it without my permission."

Sakura would have to remind Sasuke to leave Itachi's training equipment in a less than ideal state more often, she thought. Of all things, that seemingly put Itachi in a talkative mood.

* * *

She was up to her arms in blood and sweat when she saw Itachi next.

This was one week after their shared breakfast at the Uchiha home.

He showed up at the hospital right around the time when Sakura had stepped in to assist with a transplant procedure. She had exited the operating room, her hair mussed and her face sweaty, when she all but walked directly into his arms.

"Haruno-san," he said and greeted her with a small bow. This was something that Sakura had observed everyone within the hospital to do. Guests, patient and staff alike. She received scarcely any such sort of bows outside of the hospital, possibly also because she spent most of her time inside the hospital, but she received a right plethora of polite gestures whilst wandering the halls of her workplace. Maybe it shouldn't surprise her, not anymore, but it nonetheless still did. She had a hard time shaking it off. It made her uncomfortable. Maybe she was better at her job than most people were at theirs, but she was still just a person who did her job.

She didn't thrive on attention. In fact, she thrived the best away from it.

"Uchiha-san," Sakura said in return and wiped her face with a cloth. "What brings you here?"

"Visiting."

"A friend?" she asked and moved the cloth to her arms, Itachi's eyes following.

"Of a sort."

Sakura nodded as if she understood what that meant.

"I requested for Na- the Hokage to give you some time off for your annual physical examination," Sakura said and looked past Itachi to where a patient was wheeled through the corridor with what looked like two frostbitten hands. She made a mental note to check up on that. Not the frostbite, of course, but rather why he was being wheeled around on the wrong floor. "You haven't been in for the check-up, and your last day is up tomorrow. You are aware of this?"

Sakura obviously couldn't keep track of every shinobi's medical journal, but she made it a point to keep track of a limited list that included mostly ANBU members and jonin that ought to be ANBU members. Unsurprisingly, Itachi was a part of that list, including Neji, Shikamaru, Tenten, Sasuke, most of the Uchiha clan, and a grand slew of Kakashi's friends. Kakashi himself hadn't made it, but that was because he never showed up for any exams, anyway, and Sakura had to track him down and perform the procedure wherever she caught a hold of him. Once, that had been in a back alley of an infamous brothel. That had been a most memorable experience, and reiterating it to Sasuke and Naruto had been an even more memorable experience.

"I will go later today."

"See that you do, please."

Itachi nodded and motioned as if to leave.

"By the way," Sakura said and pulled her sleeves down to cover her arms where goosebumps had appeared from the air-conditioned hallway. "I relayed your message to Sasuke."

Itachi gave the vague impression that he lifted an eyebrow, but Sakura saw no muscle move on his face. "In the future, he will return your training equipment in proper condition," she said.

"It seems I am now in your debt."

Sakura thought that was a bit excessive, but the light playfulness in Itachi's voice had her intrigued enough for her not to care about his actual words. "Do you want to hear his response?"

"Not necessarily. Until next time, Haruno-san."

"Take the exam," Sakura said on a departing note. "And tell Shisui-san to do the same, please."

She watched him go while she replayed their conversation from last week inside her head.

Sasuke treated her as he was able.

He treated her as he was able.

That was true, wasn't it?

She couldn't fault him for that, could she?

* * *

Most of Sakura's friends easily agreed that her morning jogs were inane and superfluous. Shinobi got enough exercise doing their daily job, they said, but Sakura's jogs were not so much a physical exercise as they were a form of meditation. Of course her friends also tended to forget that Sakura's daily job had become less fieldwork and more paperwork since she took over the management of the hospital, but at least Naruto could relate to this with his recently acclaimed position as the Hokage of Konohagakure; they were both up to their neck in paperwork.

On this particular morning, two days after Sakura's encounter with Itachi in the hospital, a fine mist hung in the air and added a ghostly touch to the landscape.

Today, Sakura had decided to run her favorite route.

This consisted of a large, sweeping curve of a gravel road that lay on the outskirts of a wealthier civilian neighborhood. No properties stuck close to the road out here. You felt a sense of solitude that you rarely felt anywhere else inside the village itself.

Out here, Sakura rarely met any passersby.

Out here, she could think.

Yesterday, Sasuke had told her that he loved her.

In terms as vague as possible, of course, but Sakura had heard it for what it was.

And yet, in spite of Sasuke's long-awaited proclamation of love and thus commitment, Itachi's words were the ones that resonated strongest within her mind.

Sasuke treated her as he was able.

But what if maybe, just maybe, Sakura could want more than that?

Maybe she ought to want more than that?

Sasuke's timing had always been impeccable, of course. Sakura wasn't surprised that he had chosen now of all times to explicitly declare his love for her. If Sakura said jump, Sasuke crouched, and if she said crouch, he jumped. It was only natural that he would declare his love for her the very same minute that Sakura began to question her own love for him.

She charged on ahead, the phantom figures of Sasuke and Itachi chasing her, mindless of the rising sun and the mist that dissipated around her in a perfect mockery of her scrambled thoughts.

* * *

Three weeks lulled by before Sakura had another conversation with Itachi.

These weeks were filled with Ino gushing in Sakura's ear about how lucky she was to have snatched the most eligible bachelor around. Naruto was much the same, although he didn't exactly call Sasuke the most eligible bachelor around, nor did he congratulate Sakura for snatching him. He slapped her shoulder and gave her a thumbs-up. Sakura yet had to tell Kakashi about Sasuke and him dropping the feels on her. That fact alone should have told her all that she needed to know about her own feelings in the matter, and yet she decided to play ignorant.

"You're still favoring your left shoulder," she said as she watched Sasuke sharpen the blades that he had laid out on the grass before himself, displayed in a most beloved manner. They sat cross-legged in the backyard of the Uchiha home where they had a superb view of the treetops in the horizon, sticking up into the air like towers of a ghostly village. "The fractures should have healed by now. Unless you've gone against doctor's orders and hit the training grounds prematurely. Have you?"

"I'm dating my doctor. Doesn't that give me some leeway?"

Sakura felt a twinge of irritation twist her face. "Sasuke," she began. "If you want to-"

"I'm sorry," he said and put his weapons down to give her a kiss that she suspected was mostly just to make her shut up. "But you know that I don't want to sit idle any more than Naruto does, and you don't tell him to take it easy."

Considering that Sakura was about to answer in a snippy tone that Naruto also had superhuman healing from a buddy of a fox that lived inside of his stomach, it was probably for the best that Itachi made his appearance just then, promptly popping up behind Sasuke like a sprout from Tsunade's herbal garden that only Sakura and a few select others had permission to enter.

"Your presence is requested in the kitchen, little brother," he told Sasuke and reached down to fluff up Sasuke's hair. "Mom or dad?" Sasuke asked and wafted his brother's hand away.

"Both," Itachi answered. "What did you do this time?"

"I did nothing," said Sasuke and stood up with a nonchalance that betrayed the expression on his face. It was an expression that only his parents had the ability to instill. Sakura and Naruto had done their best in the past years to produce it themselves, but they had had no success so far. Ergo, it remained an expression reserved for his parents alone. It was an equal mix of dread, vexation and discomfort. Sakura personally thought that it made Sasuke's nose wrinkle up in a most adorable way, but she had never told him that and probably never would.

"I'll wait here," Sakura called after him.

"I have a question for you," Itachi said when Sasuke was out of earshot.

"Okay," answered Sakura, feeling magnanimous this morning.

"Why did you become a medic?"

She hadn't expected a personal question. "I… give me a minute."

Itachi took his eyes off the horizon to look down at her. The angle created the impression of an idol from old ages, grand and towering with the power to move mountains and split oceans. It was similar to an aura that Sasuke had emitted once upon time, way before Sakura had seen him burn his food on the stove and nick himself with a razor while bent over a puddle in the ground. Maybe that was why Kakashi wore a mask, she thought. It saved him the humiliation of shaving during weeklong missions with no immediate mirrors or reflective surfaces available. She knew that he was a deceptively tidy person, everything considered. It seemed very likely, didn't it?

"You can fight solo on a battleground and your chakra control is among the finest in the village," said Itachi and brought Sakura back to the matter at hand. Apparently, he would allow her no more time to think. "Why did you choose medicine for a career?"

"Being a fighter was… something that I had to force, I guess. I assume that Sasuke or Naruto has told you about our chunin exam? Cutting my hair during the exam was a symbolic move, though I didn't truly understand it back then. I just did it, spurred on by adrenaline. Nowadays the shorter hair is just practical. I can't go dropping hair into open wounds, can I?"

Itachi's silence prompted her to continue.

"I had an affinity for being a healer. I discovered this late. I thought being a fighter was what I wanted. That's what my teammates were and still are. I wanted their respect. Naruto is a diplomat and politician now, although a rather unorthodox one, and Sasuke crafts high-quality weapons for professionals, but they'll always enjoy the battlefield more than any of those things. I never enjoyed fighting, you see. Not in the beginning. Not when I was no good at it. Tsunade-shishou schooled me in chakra control to help me become a better fighter. I wanted to be Naruto's and Sasuke's equal. The healing was a secondary endeavor at first. When I realized that I really wanted to heal rather than kill, I was good enough at killing that it seemed a waste to give it up completely when it could still be of use. I'm primarily a medic, but I can also be more."

Something about Itachi made Sakura want to talk. You couldn't rise to the rank of ANBU Captain and manage a team of wunderkinds without adequate social skills and management skills at hand, so maybe Sakura shouldn't be surprised that Itachi was a good listener. With that thought still fresh in her mind, she startled when he sat down next to her.

"I wish to spar with you," he said.

"Here? Now?" she asked.

"Another day," he said.

She promised him nothing, not explicitly, but she also understood that this had nothing to do with promises and more to do with a natural progression towards a friendship that she would not have thought possible if you had asked her one month ago.

Sasuke treated her as he was able, but was it fair to blame him for that?

"He loves me," she said to Itachi on a whim. "He told me so the other day."

"Sasuke can love. It's not always for the better."

"You sound like you know."

"I sound like I have eyes in my head," Itachi said and stood up from the ground. Bits of grass and dirt fell from his clothes onto Sakura's face. She blew it away, but some got stuck in her eye.

"You know," she said. "When these things happen to me, Naruto is almost always involved."

"What things?"

"Absurd things," Sakura said and looked skywards with her eyes closed. "Crazy, weird things. If I didn't already believe you to be immune to Naruto's whims, to anybody's whims, I would think this to be such a case, too."

Itachi stayed a moment longer, almost as if he had something to say.

Then he left.

* * *

Sakura and Kakashi stood in front of Naruto's desk inside his office, motes of dust twinkling in the sunlight that peeked inside the room through the closed blinds. Naruto didn't like sitting inside on sunny days, copped up with work as he always was, so he had taken to closing the blinds on days like this one. It was a trick that had kept him seated in his chair at times where he longed to be on the other side of those blinds. Not for the first time, Sakura admired her friend's fortitude.

"This is abuse of authority, you know," she said.

"I agree with Sakura," said Kakashi, scratching the material of his mask which always bothered him on hot days like these. "I have important things to do. People to see. Plants to water. Also, I retired one year ago, so you shouldn't be able to summon me."

"Guys, come on. I barely see you anymore," Naruto said and hung off the edge of his desk like a ragdoll with torn seams. "As fun as managing a country is, then it's not very fun, okay? So please? And technically you didn't retire, Kakashi. You went down to half-time on domestic jobs only."

"I could have sworn I asked for retirement."

"You asked. It wasn't granted."

"Ah. Now I seem to remember."

Naruto had summoned Sakura and Kakashi to his office earlier that day under the pretense that he had important matters to discuss with the two shinobi. It had turned out that his important matter was his wish to propose to Hinata, and that he wanted their advice on the most romantic way to do this. Sakura had no idea why he thought that she would be of any help in this regard. She was the least romantic female of her generation, and she doubted that Kakashi was any more of a romantic than she was. They had that in common, too.

"If that's the case, why didn't you also summon Sasuke?" she asked Naruto and picked at a hangnail on her thumb that had bothered her all morning. She needed to moisturize more, but she always forgot. Time was of essence and hangnails were not, she supposed.

"Because Sasuke doesn't understand this sorta stuff. He wouldn't be of any help. He'd just call me a wuss and tell me to find my balls," Naruto said and then seemed to realize the implication of these words on a woman who was Sasuke's girlfriend. "Uh. Wait, no, that's not what I meant, Sakura-chan. Sasuke definitely understands romantic-"

"I don't think I love him."

Sakura realized the truth of her words only after she had spoken them aloud – and then she hadn't expected Naruto to light up into a smile. "Thank God," he said.

"Excuse me?"

"How did you come to this realization, Sakura?" Kakashi asked.

"It was something Itachi said," she answered and pondered Kakashi's deadpan tone and peculiar choice of words. "And stop smiling, Naruto. Why're you smiling?"

"Now we just need to make Sasuke realize that he also doesn't love you!"

"What? He told me that he loves me," Sakura told her blond friend, still slightly bewildered by the easy acceptance from both of her longtime friends.

"He doesn't know any better, that's why," Naruto said and fell backwards into his chair with an ease born from practice rather than chance. He looked every bit a sloth and not a respected leader. Sakura wondered how he acted around everyone else. Surely, he couldn't act like this around everyone that stepped a foot into his office. He had a position and reputation to uphold. In all likelihood, Sasuke, Sakura and Kakashi had picked the shortest straw of the bunch without ever being aware that any picks had taken place.

"And how would you know that, dimwit?" Sakura asked Naruto. The smile on Naruto's face took on a sly edge that Sakura had heard Ino and Tenten gush about late at night and with wine heavy in their blood. It was one that Sakura herself had only ever interpreted as a pestilence and didn't find sexy at all, contrary to what Ino and Tenten tried to make her believe.

"What did Itachi say to you, Sakura?" Kakashi asked and diverted Sakura's attention from Naruto.

"It doesn't matter."

"Why won't you tell us?" Naruto asked, smirk still in place.

"Because it's Sasuke. You two are biased."

"And Sasuke's own brother is not biased?"

"Really, Kakashi?" asked Sakura.

"My, my," he said with a crinkle of his eye.

"You're just gonna give Itachi all the credit?" Naruto asked her, still lounging in his chair.

"Don't pout. Help me figure out how to break this to Sasuke without doing irreparable damage."

"My plants are hours past their feeding time," Kakashi said and began to backtrack towards the door, one hand already in his pocket. "And you two don't need me for this. I'll see myself out."

With Kakashi gone, Sakura turned to Naruto and saw that his face had turned somber in the meantime. "Look," he said, "you won't do any damage. Sasuke doesn't love you."

"He told me that he does, Naruto," Sakura said and didn't feel much hurt by Naruto's words. Again, this was a testament to the truth that she had known for quite some time.

"And do you believe him?"

"I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt at least."

"Should I summon Itachi here? See what he says?"

Sakura was damned to feel a jump in her pulse at the brash drop of Itachi's name.

"I felt that," Naruto said, that pestilence of a smile ever more pronounced. "Itachi's really in your head, huh? I guess he would have to be. If he's made you admit that you don't love Sasuke, he's gotta be. Should I really summon him?"

"I know that you've chosen to be selectively blind to this particular fact, Naruto, but you can't use summons for personal gain. It's an actual clause in the legislation. Or paragraph, whatever. I've read it. Proof-read it, in fact."

"Mm? The what-what?"

She would ask Sasuke for a break, she thought.

That should make the eventual transition into an ex-couple less awkward for both of them.

Where was the intercontinental war when you needed it? She would rather face an army of a thousand men than face Sasuke and ask him for a break in a relationship that she had thought nothing wrong of until Itachi had taken an interest in it, calling her out on something that she had known for a while, but which she hadn't been prepared to face.

* * *

"Okay."

"Okay?" Sakura asked and looked for any sign on Sasuke's face that indicated his actual feelings on the matter. She knew that he had them, just that he was indisposed to show them. "I ask for a break, and you say okay?"

"What else should I say?" asked Sasuke.

It was two days after Sakura's conversation with Naruto and Kakashi. Ino had tried to talk her out of doing this, out of suggesting to Sasuke that they take a break, but when Sakura's mind was set on something, she saw it through with nothing to spare. This had nothing to do with her zodiac, as Ino was wont to claim, but a lot more to do with having teammates such as Naruto and Sasuke. They had enough determination to hand it around on a platter. Their life philosophy? If you made a decision, you stuck to it, period.

"I don't know," Sakura said and felt utterly uncomfortable with the anticlimax that this moment had turned out to be. "Maybe argue your side a little bit more?"

"But that's pointless when my side agrees with yours."

"I don't know."

"Sakura," Sasuke said and reached up to tuck a lock of her hair behind her ear. "It's fine. I have a mission coming up that'll last all month."

"You do?"

"A last-minute thing. Naruto assigned it to me."

Meddlesome fool, Sakura thought, but not without fondness.

"Domestic or across border?" she asked.

"Across border."

And that was that.

* * *

Sakura and Sasuke had formerly spent months apart more than once as a result of their high-profile jobs and the demands that came with that. During those times, neither of them had felt an acute need to abandon their professional duties and reunite with each other. Two halves becoming one whole? That had never been their thing. They were independent adults, not love-sick teenagers.

And yet now, with their relationship on a break, Sakura missed Sasuke like one would miss a foot.

It was irony at its best, a twisted version of setting someone free to see if they would return to you, and Sakura was not happy at all.

"This was supposed to make me feel better," she told Naruto one day over lunch, around one week after Sasuke had left for his overseas mission. "To make us both feel better."

"Give it time," Naruto said through a mouth of noodles. "You're a creature of habit, Sakura-chan. Both you and Sasuke. You need time to adjust. Why do you think you waited so long to realize you don't love Sasuke? And why do you think he asked you to be his girlfriend in the first place? Why did you say yes when he asked?"

"Gee, Naruto," Sakura said and stabbed his cheek with a salty breadstick. "Your faith in me is astounding. And you look like a chipmunk. Swallow before you take another bite."

* * *

The third week rolled by.

Sakura no longer missed Sasuke like one would miss a foot.

She missed him like one would miss a leg.

This was in spite of Naruto's reassurances that it was a hurdle she needed to cross to get over to the other side – the good side, Sakura-chan! Well, she thought at last, you might not be able to beat your way through a hurdle, but you could beat your way through an extensive training regimen until your body was too sore for your mind to bother itself with the hurdle any longer.

"I believe we had a rain check, did we not?"

Sakura's foot slipped on the boulder beneath the weight of her body, slick with rain and covered in moss, and she back-flipped her way out of a broken hipbone, landing neatly on the ground in front of the intruder who turned out to be none other than Uchiha Itachi.

"Itachi-san," she said, mud seeping into her sandals where she sat crouched on the ground. Like a slow-moving parasite, the murky substance went up between her toes, spreading to underneath her nails. Into her blood, she thought. It felt good. It felt like she was doing something, anything, to get rid of the restlessness that clawed at her insides. It was a restlessness that the hospital almost always fell short at ridding her of, but where physical strain and the many memories of smoky battlefields typically did the trick.

"A rain check, you say?" she asked Itachi, breathless from the physical exertion and with a runny nose from the muggy weather. "Is that a pun? I didn't think you made those."

His eyes spanned the overcast sky, then moved to the vast expanse of ground where it stretched far and wide around them. Then they came to rest upon her. "So you remembered that you promised me a sparring session," he said.

In the dim light of dusk and with rain hanging in the air like a veil, Sakura could almost imagine that it was Sasuke who stood in front of her. If it hadn't been for the difference in feeling between the two, Sakura would have thought that her mind was playing tricks on her. Where Sasuke breathed air into her, opened her up and made her feel safe in her skin, Itachi was the opposite. He compressed the air around him, marking it as undiscovered territory prone to blow up in her face.

"I heard that you asked my brother for a break," Itachi said and began to circle Sakura.

Sakura recognized the move. She remained crouched on the ground, ready to pounce or retreat.

"I see that the rumor mill is as impressive as ever," she answered.

A heavy gust of wind, full of rain and cold, appeared out of nowhere to hit Sakura's in the face. It blurred her vision, breaking her focus. As if Itachi had somehow predicted that single moment of distraction, and maybe he had, he suddenly stood in front of her. He was there, within the blink of an eye, their heads close enough to bump together if either of them took a deep enough breath.

"You look like Sasuke," Sakura said, tasting rainwater and dirt on her lips.

"I've been told."

"A hell of a lot," she said. "Looks like him a hell of a lot."

"My brother is no good for you, Sakura. You know this."

"We're on a break. I'm working on it," Sakura said and clenched her fist in the mud, prepared to throw a hit at the elder Uchiha, both for his sarcasm and for looking so stupidly much like Sasuke underneath the rain and the oncoming dusk. "We both agreed to ease our way out of it, not just cut it off immediately. Why is this your concern, anyway? Shouldn't you be talking to Sasuke instead of me? He's your brother. He's more your responsibility than I am."

"How can you know I haven't talked to him?"

"Bullshit."

She raised her fist from the ground, but Itachi had predicted her move once again. His own hand shot out to grab hers. While Sakura had chakra to aid her way, and a hell of a lot of it, it helped little when she had no momentum. In the limited space that she had at her disposal, crouched and close as they sat, it came down to raw muscle and strength. This was where Itachi beat Sakura by far. He forced her hand back on the ground, the grip slippery with mud. Sakura had often been overpowered like this, held immobile and within deadly proximity of her opponent, but when Itachi's hand rubbed over hers, perversely slick with water and mud, Sakura had to admit that the man before her was no more her opponent than she was his sister.

"Wait," she said and tried to break her hand free from his. "No."

"No what?" Itachi asked. Too quiet. Too soft.

"No," Sakura said, stronger now. "This is ridiculous."

"And why is that, Sakura?"

Sakura stopped and made the mistake of looking into Itachi's eyes. She had feared that she would see Sasuke, head on a pillow and with a wicked look in his eyes, but that wasn't what she saw. She saw Itachi, wet hair sticking to his face and a look in his eyes that went straight to her stomach, and somehow that made it much, much worse. Yes, she had always harbored a professional admiration for Itachi. Likewise, she had also harbored a more personal admiration for the man, one that was fit for late nights and empty bottles, but Sakura was not a fickle woman. What was happening here, underneath the rain, was a case of projection. Sakura was projecting her longing for Sasuke onto his brother – and that was a no-go. If she had wanted Itachi for Itachi, she could have dealt with it. After all, denial now aside, she dealt with that on a regular basis. But _this_ , this right here, wanting Itachi for Sasuke and not for Itachi himself, was not something that she would do.

"Sakura," Itachi said and demanded her attention.

"What?"

"Do you remember the time that we shared breakfast?"

"How could I not?"

"Do you know how many times I've seen you wandering my home in the early morning," he said, "despondent and without aim, left alone by my brother when he should have stayed?"

"You followed me around?"

"I do have a job."

"Is that another joke?" Sakura said, more befuddled than ever.

"Yes," Itachi said and stood up, releasing her far too complacently after what that had just occurred. Sakura had no way of regaining her composure. He allowed her no time to adjust. "Sasuke will return in a week's time, will he not?"

"He… yes. That's the plan."

"Good. I'll see you then."

"Wait- what?"

If she was honest about it, really honest, her attraction to Itachi had always been there. It had never been a reality before now, however, which explained why she had remained in denial. One could easily remain in denial of fantasies, but when the fantasy turned to reality, denial was no longer an option. Sakura should've known better, really. Sasuke had been a fantasy once upon a time, too. A fantasy that had fallen short when it had become reality, yes, but still a fantasy.

* * *

True to Itachi's own words, Sakura didn't see him again until after Sasuke had returned to Konoha.

It happened at the trio's regular hangout, a bar just down the road of Sakura's apartment, where they got service for free, courtesy of how Sakura had once saved the owner's son from a life of paralysis. Perks of the job, Naruto would say to which Sakura and Sasuke would both agree.

When the three of them stepped inside the bar, Sakura immediately saw Itachi where he sat in a corner with a small number of people. One of them was in fact her neighbor, his name Nobu, which explained why Itachi was at the bar in the very first place. Sakura was shocked to find that he was friends, or at least acquaintances, with Nobu, considering that Nobu was a butcher and not exactly the kind of person that a shinobi would have much opportunity to make friends with. Then again, maybe his profession wasn't so far off from what a shinobi did for a living.

"Sakura-san!" Nobu called out to Sakura, predictably enough. "Come sit. Sit, sit, sit."

They joined the group in the booth, and Sakura got a seat opposite of Itachi's. She was flanked by Sasuke and Naruto, an overprotective habit that they had never managed to drop in spite of how she could beat both of them in a fair fight. Sasuke didn't greet his brother, but the rest of them went through the customary introductions. The mismatched group engaged in conversation that spanned from foreign policies to animal feces, Naruto's favorite ice-breaker. Both Sakura and Sasuke knew that one by heart and joined in with their pre-rehearsed lines.

And all the while, Sakura could feel Itachi's eyes on her face.

Under different circumstances, she would have enjoyed it, being Uchiha Itachi's complete center of attention, the novelty of it, heady and flammable, but right now, rubbing shoulders with Sasuke, she mostly wanted to punch him in his pretty face. They both knew that Sasuke would notice Itachi's behavior, sitting right next to Sakura and therefore also opposite of his brother, so she wasn't surprised that Sasuke turned towards her the second that Itachi left for the restroom, mouth poised in a whisper.

"Why does my brother stare at you, Sakura?"

"Maybe it's my hair."

"It's not your hair. He's seen that plenty of times."

"Ask him. I don't know his intentions any better than you."

"Intentions?" Sasuke repeated. Sakura cursed her choice of words. They had been automatic, partly out of panic to have Sasuke drop the topic, but now she realized that they had held an implication that Sasuke had heard and understood with minimal effort on his part. "Why would he have intentions towards you, Sakura? And what do you mean by intentions?"

"I'll explain later."

When Itachi returned to the table, Sakura caught his eyes, sending him a look that told him exactly what she thought of his underhanded scheme. Unfortunately, she had to drop her gaze after just a second or two, because what she found on Itachi's face was not regret or remorse in the slightest.

"What do you mean that he was challenging you?" Sasuke asked her later.

He had insisted on walking her home in spite of the short distance that it took to get there. It was an excuse to interrogate her, Sakura knew that. She didn't blame him for it, not one bit. Itachi had been absolutely shameless for the entirety of the evening, boring holes in her skull with those flinty eyes of his, posing her a challenge that she simply could not rise to, and which, by the end of the night, had her positively seething in her seat. This had, of course, been his intention from the start, an attempt to force Sakura into a confrontation with Sasuke, but Sakura had never thought that he would stoop so low.

"I mean exactly that," she told Sasuke. "That he was challenging me."

"Itachi doesn't just sit and stare at people for hours on end, Sakura."

They had stopped walking. They stood in the street, facing each other with the intimacy of former lovers, and it made the guilt run absolutely rampant inside of Sakura's body, making her hands shake with the need to escape the situation and the scrutiny of Sasuke, because she was the one at fault here. She was the one who had become friends with his brother, the one who was now moments away from instigating something more with that selfsame brother, something that she had recently shared with Sasuke himself.

"What's going on here, Sakura?"

"Your brother has taken an unhealthy interest in our relationship."

"He always does that."

"What?"

"With every relationship of mine," Sasuke said. "I thought he might skip you, since he already knew you, but I suppose he didn't. You could've told me sooner and spared the confusion."

"He… he said some stuff that made me reconsider our… what we were doing."

"That's why you broke it off."

"You're not angry. Why are you not angry?"

He slouched his shoulders and put his hands in his pockets. "We're better as friends, aren't we?"

There was nothing that Sakura could say to that except for yes. "We did… I mean, we did love each other, didn't we?" she asked.

With a smile that looked partly like a grimace, Sasuke took his hands out of his pockets to wrap his arms around her shoulders. "With all the times that Naruto has drunkenly proclaimed how much he loves us, there must be love between friends, too, mustn't there?"

This what was real life felt like, Sakura thought in the warmth of Sasuke's familiar embrace. This was real life. Not a fantasy. She understood better now.

* * *

It should have felt like closure, but it didn't. It felt more like waking up from a bad dream only to realize that real life wasn't much better off than the dream, bad as they both were, and Sakura strongly suspected that Sasuke felt the same way if what happened the following day was any indication.

"Haruno-san?"

"Yes?" said Sakura and looked up from her paperwork, pressing four fingers to her aching temples. She hadn't been able to sleep last night, understandably, which was something that she now dearly regretted. Sakura had never been a morning person, much less a person that functioned with little to no sleep at all.

"There's someone who wishes to see you."

"I don't do office hours. Tell the person to-"

"It's Uchiha Itachi," the orderly said. "He says you want to see him."

Well, Sakura thought and pursed her lips, she did want to see him, didn't she?

"All right," she said and pushed her paperwork aside, her shoulders already tightening with tension. She was still angry, oh yes, but that would soon be Itachi's own fault for forcing his presence onto hers only one day after the disastrous night at the bar. "Let him in, please."

It came as something of a shock to Sakura when Itachi stepped into her office with a black eye that marred his otherwise spotless skin. It came as even more of a shock that, as he sat down in the chair opposite of her desk, she didn't at first see the brother of Sasuke, but rather the image of Itachi, slick with rain and mud in the oncoming dusk. The true image, she realized with a start.

"Sasuke, was it?" she asked him and sat back in her chair with a stiff body that belied the casual attitude she was trying to project. Her face felt hot, but it wasn't from embarrassment as it had been in the past. She had accepted her attraction to the man, and she no longer felt guilty for it, not after her conversation with Sasuke last night, but she also wouldn't let him pull her around the ring one more time. Yesterday had been more than enough. "I'm surprised he didn't do more, honestly."

"He would have," Itachi said, "if the Hokage hadn't been there."

Sakura sat up straighter in her chair, anger momentarily forgotten. "Naruto? Where exactly did Sasuke approach you? Not at home, I take it?"

"It doesn't matter."

"What did Naruto say? Or do? Sasuke wouldn't have stopped unless-"

"He said that you liked me."

"He said…" she stopped, shaking her head. "That wouldn't have stopped Sasuke."

Itachi waited a second or two. "I said it was mutual."

Sakura stood up from her chair as if a trauma patient had just been wheeled into the room. In a way, that was the case, she thought, only that the trauma patient was herself and not someone that she could do surgery on no matter how badly she wished to. "You said-"

"I spoke the truth."

She swung around on him, still seated in the chair as he was, smart enough not to distress her any further than what he had already done. "Sasuke might have accepted that we are better off as friends, but that's a far cry from accepting that his brother and ex-girlfriend have the hots for each other."

"The hots?" asked Itachi, his own voice clear and soft compared to Sakura's. He finally stood up from his chair, a waft of firewood and nightfall circulating the room in the wake of his movement, and Sakura turned towards the window, wondering not for the first time why she had ended up in this situation, jumping from one Uchiha to the next as if it was a game and she had hit the jackpot. It wasn't that she didn't want Itachi, but this was so far removed from what—

"Sakura." He was behind her, directly behind her, staring out the window over her shoulder. "It's not as complicated as you think. Sasuke understands this. You may ask him if you wish, but he understands. In a world of pain and death, are we not allowed to take what little pleasures for ourselves that we are able to?"

"That's the problem," Sakura said and turned around, her sleeve brushing Itachi's. "My world no longer consists of pain and death, but yours still does. This, whatever it is, won't work under those circumstances." She stared at his eye, the one that was bruised and battered, and smothered the urge to reach up and wipe the color away with her hand. "What do you want from me? You're the one who has been pursuing this. We both know that, know this. What do you want?"

The bruised and battered eye stared back at her. "You."

She took a breath and let it out in a great whoosh that had their chests touching like two blades of grass under the mercy of the wind. "Then you have to wait."

He stared at her for a moment longer, silent and unreceptive. She almost balked, though that would have been pointless and now what she wanted to achieve. Then he turned around and left her alone by the window where the sun felt hot on her back and the air-conditioned room felt cold on her face.

That was how Naruto found her, half an hour later.

"Sakura-chan?" he said after he had knocked and entered the room.

"Yes," she said and removed herself from the window. "Official or unofficial?"

"Unofficial," he said. "Or both, maybe. How about we start out unofficially and move to officially?"

"You're here to check up on me, aren't you? How did you know Itachi was here?"

"I saw him leave the building," he said. "Happenstance, honestly. I have a village to run. I can always meddle in your affairs, sorry."

"Where's Sasuke? You were with him, weren't you?"

"He wanted to be left alone. You want the same?"

She thought about it. "Not really," she answered with a look around the room that still seemed to hold Itachi's presence within it, both wanted and unwanted. "What do you propose?"

"Funny that you should choose that particular world," he said, a slow smile spreading on his face. "I decided on a way to propose to Hinata. With little help from you guys, by the way, so I still think you're a bunch of awful friends. In fact, I don't understand—"

"What?" Sakura exclaimed once she had processed the words and their meaning, her own troubles diminished in the face of such glad news. "Tell me! Did you decide on public or private? Because if you chose public, she'll probably say no even if she wants to say yes, you know. You do know, don't you?"

* * *

Strangely, or perhaps not so much, Sasuke was the one who put Sakura's head back in order.

"You need to talk to Itachi," he said one week after the incident with the black eye. "I don't care, Sakura. You know that, don't you? I know that we haven't talked about this, but that was because I thought we didn't have to, and yet Itachi has been a pain in the ass all week, and I only now got him to tell me why that was. I thought you were smart enough to know how I felt already, Sakura."

Sakura, with her chopsticks halfway into her mouth, lowered them slowly to her plate. Naruto, who sat next to her, stuffed his own pair as far into his mouth as was physically possible. Sasuke, having slipped into the seat next to Naruto and thus opposite of Sakura, looked at her expectantly, his face entirely calm and not distressed, or closed off, in the least. He was speaking the truth, it seemed.

"No one is smart enough to know what you feel, Sasuke," she said at last.

"I'm with Sakura on that one," Naruto said, swallowing his rice.

"You're not better," she aimed at him before refocusing on Sasuke. "It's not that I don't want to talk to your brother, but—"

"You're not intimidated by him, are you?"

"No. Not in the normal sense, I suppose."

"You mean the romantic sense, then."

Feeling uncomfortable underneath Sasuke's scrutiny, extremely spot-on as it was, Sakura prepared to stand up and… what? Leave? Run? Had it come to that, now? Really?

"Sakura," Sasuke said, rightly stilling her in her seat. "I can count on one hand the times that Itachi has indicated any sort of interest in a woman. If anything, he should be intimidated by you. Since I don't care what the two of you do, which I really don't at this point in time, you need to man up and talk to my brother." He paused. "Which I know that you can. Far better than him, in fact. Remember that time—"

"Yes, yes," she said, realizing that Sasuke had cleverly prompted her into cutting him off. She knew all too well what he had been about to refer to, and she wanted nobody, not even Naruto, to ever know of that. "How the hell did my life end up like this?" she asked no one in particular.

"It started with an orange," Sasuke answered to which both Sakura and Naruto raised their brows. "That's what Itachi said," he told them and snatched Naruto's chopsticks, digging into his friend's meal of which there was more than enough for three people at the very least. "Beats me what he meant by that, but that's what he answered."

Sakura, knowing full well what Itachi had meant and that in every sense of the word, quenched the sudden bout of laughter that built up from deep within her gut. "He didn't mention apples?" she asked the confused faces of Sasuke and Naruto. They had their arms poised in a halfhearted battle for Naruto's chopsticks. "Apples and oranges?" she prompted. "In this situation? Really, you guys?"

Surprisingly, Naruto was the one to break into laughter first.

"What?" Sasuke asked the two of them. "Will you stop laughing? The Hokage doesn't laugh like a fool in public, Naruto. If you want to laugh, you should give me the job. I've said more than once that I want it, haven't I?"

"Shut up," Naruto said good-naturedly and punched Sasuke in the shoulder. "And buy your own food, moron, don't hog mine just because I'm richer than you."

"Please, do you how much money lies in my name?"

"Sakura's soon-to-be name, you mean?" Naruto said, but at that point Sakura was already gone.

* * *

She found Itachi not at the Uchiha home where she had initially gone to search for him, but inside the jonin headquarters where he stood surrounded by his colleagues. Kakashi was nearby, his form immediately recognizable to his former student, but Sakura refused to let anything deter her in her self-appointed task. Knowing that Itachi would see her approach, if not sense it, she kept one arm behind her back, shielding the item that she held in her hand. As such, with her elbow rudely protruding where she rested her left arm behind her back, she strode up to the group of jonin and offered her helloes. Saving Itachi for last, she turned to him with a smile on her face far different from the one she had presented to the many faces prior to his.

"Hold out your hand," she said, formalities dropped.

He did as she asked, no hesitation whatsoever, this to the surprise of the men by his side.

With his hand splayed out in mid-air, palm facing upwards in a show of blind trust, Sakura reached out with her own hand and dropped into his hand the item that she had held hidden within her own. "I thought that if you didn't like the orange, you might like the apple," she said while both of them stared at the shiny red apple cradled in his palm. "I know that I like the apple better, anyhow," she said and took her eyes off the apple to look into his. "What do you think?"

Staring her in the eye, dead on, Itachi lifted the apple and bit into the juicy flesh.

* * *

"Sakura," Ino said. "Can you please get your fiancé to stop ruining the celebrations?"

Sakura looked up from the piece of cake that she was eating. Hinata stood by her side with her own piece of cake which was, surprisingly enough, far bigger than Sakura's. Hinata had a sweet tooth that matched her demeanor all too well, but it had grown far bigger recently. Sakura suspected that her friend might be pregnant, but she wouldn't suggest it just yet. Chances were that Hinata already suspected herself and had chosen not to tell anyone. For now, anyway. The silver wedding band on her finger was one of the most beautiful understated pieces of jewelry that Sakura had ever seen. She remembered when Naruto had first showed it to her, and how she had plainly refused to believe that he was the sole person behind the purchase, considering that understated was not among Naruto's many fortes. "Ruining?" she asked Ino. "What's he doing?"

"Nothing," Ino said with a blow of air to remove a lock of hair from her forehead. "That's the problem. He's scaring the kids with his silence and stares."

"Maybe if they stopped pestering him for stories about—" Sakura began, but quickly changed gears at the look on Ino's face, "—but, yes, of course I'll talk to him. We can't have him ruining the party." She handed her piece of cake to Hinata, who accepted it all too willingly. "Where is he?"

"Outside," Ino said, sounding resigned. "With Sasuke. Which doesn't really make things any better."

Sakura found the two brothers outside of Ino and Shikamaru's newly bought, and nicely decorated, house. While the two brothers indeed did stand around with little to no conversation transpiring between the two of them, they didn't stand around sullenly like Ino had insinuated to Sakura. She clearly didn't know the difference between a sullen Uchiha and an indifferent one, Sakura thought.

Sasuke saw her first. "Sakura," he said. "Is Naruto inside?"

"Yes. With Chouji and Kiba, I think. D'you need him?"

"I'll go find him myself," he said with a clap to Itachi's shoulder that seemed to signify something important if Itachi's answering smirk was any indication. "Fancy dress," Sasuke said to Sakura in his passing her towards the house. "Looks like something my mother would wear. Or has worn, maybe?"

"What was that about?" Sakura asked Itachi when Sasuke was out of hearing range.

"Family business."

She didn't take offense. "I'll be family soon enough, won't I?"

Her clever quip earned her a fond look that bordered on exasperated. This was about as close to a look of love that she would receive from her much-reserved fiancé in public. Private was a different matter altogether, of course, but Sakura understood that this wasn't private. Besides, she thought, she got enough from Itachi in private that she needed very little from the man in public.

"Brother business, then, if not family business," Itachi amended his answer and grabbed her around the waist with a loose arm. He surprised her with the open show of affection, out here where curios eyes could pry, and Sakura was sure that it showed on her face. "You won't soon be a brother of mine, will you?" he asked her.

"I sure hope not," she said with a faint look towards the house, trying to gauge if a kiss was too out of bounds despite how Itachi seemed strangely open to such gestures at the moment with his arm looped around her waist. The look on his face, that particular one which was centered around his eyes and his mouth, was no better. It made her want to throw off her shoes and run, knowing that he would follow and bring her home.

"This is all right, isn't it?" he asked.

"What is?"

"This."

"Why…" she stopped. "Yes," she said, opting for simple. Simple was good. Simple worked for the two of them. Simple was easiest when you had no clear idea what the other person was talking about, but you could nonetheless feel, and you agreed, with the sentiment behind the words.

"Sasuke wants to enter ANBU," Itachi said, fingers playing along her waist. "He's aiming for captain. In the long run, of course. Did you know that?"

"He takes after his brother. Yes, I know," Sakura answered and felt ever closer to demanding the kiss that she could see hovering within his eyes. "Naruto doesn't like it, he's said, but he's just scared. Kakashi agrees. We need to talk to him about it, I guess, at some point. Set him straight and all that. Sasuke is more than fit for ANBU. He'd be a great asset, far better than others that have already been granted positions if you want my opinion in the matter. Did you hear about—"

Itachi kissed her, promptly and surely, and it made Sakura's toes curl up and die, easy as that.

"I figure that one Uchiha captain in ANBU should be enough," he said.

Sakura felt her stomach drop to her feet, flooring her in a way that no kiss could ever do.

Itachi turned his face towards the house and the people within it. Then he looked back at Sakura, a distinctive smile playing on his lips as the wind tickled his neck and shoulders in mimicry of what Sakura was sure to be doing later tonight. "Don't you?" he asked.

She kissed him back, as promptly and surely as he had kissed her. That, indeed, if not more.

 **.end.**


End file.
